Chapter Four

Slavery and Empire, 14411770

Part One

Introduction

Slavery and Empire, 14411770

What does the painting tell us about African slavery?

Chapter Focus Questions

How did the slave system develop? What was the history of the slave trade and the Middle Passage? How did communities develop among African Americans in the eighteenth century? What connections existed between the institutions of slavery and the imperial system of the eighteenth century? What was the early history of racism in America?

Part Two

African Slaves Build Their Own Community in Coastal Georgia

Building an African American Community in Coastal Georgia

Georgia plantations were extensions of the South Carolina rice belt.
Rice was extremely profitable. With the expansion of rice came the expansion of the slave trade.

Slaves endured great hardships in their capture, transport, and arrival in the new world. Harsh conditions greeted slaves on the plantations. Some slaves resisted but most remained slaves.
Communities developed based on kinship networks, culture (music and arts), and a common heritage.

Part Three

The Beginnings of African Slavery

Sugar and Slavery

Europeans were concerned with the moral implications of enslaving Christians.
Muslims and Africans could be used as slaves because they were not Christians.

In 1441, the Portuguese opened the trade by bringing slaves to the sugar plantations on the island of Madeira. The expansion of sugar production in the Caribbean increased the demand for slaves. Caribbean sugar and slaves were the core of the European colonial system.

West Africans
Slaves came from well-established societies and local communities of West Africa.
More than 100 peoples lived along the West African coast. Most important institution was the local community organized by kinship.

Most West African societies were polygamous and based on sophisticated systems of farming and metalworking. Extensive trade networks existed. Household slavery was an established institution.
Slaves were treated more as family than as possessions. Children were born free.

Part Four

The African Slave Trade

The African Slave Trade

The Demography of the Slave Trade Most slaves were transported to the Caribbean or South America.
One in twenty were delivered to North America (600,000)

The movement of Africans across the Atlantic was the largest forced migration in history. Between 10 and 11 million African slaves came to the New World.
Map: The African Slave Trade Table: Estimated number of African Imported to British North America, 1701-1775 Table: Africans as a Percentage of the Total Population of the British Colonies, 1650-1770

Slavers of All Nations

All Western European nations participated in the African slave trade. The slave trade was dominated by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the Dutch in the sugar boom of the seventeenth century, and the English who entered the trade in the seventeenth century. New England slavers entered the trade in the eighteenth century. Arrangements were generally made with local African headmen and chiefs to conduct raids to capture potential slaves.

Olaudah Equiano
In 1756, Olaudah Equiano was eleven years old and living with his family in Nigeria. He was captured by African slave raiders and transported to America. Purchased first by a Virginia tobacco planter and later by an English sea captain, Equiano served as a slave for ten years before buying his freedom. He published his autobiography in 1789 as part of his dedication to the antislavery cause.

The Shock of Enslavement

Enslavement was an unparalleled shock. African raiders or armies often violently attacked villages to take captives. The captives were marched in coffles to the coast, many dying along the way. On the coast, the slaves were kept in barracoons where they were separated from their families, branded, and dehumanized.

The Middle Passage

The Atlantic voyage was called the Middle Passage because it was the middle portion of the triangle trade. Slaves were crammed into ships and packed into shelves 6 feet long and 30 inches high. They slept crowded together spoon fashion. There was little or no sanitation and food was poor. Dysentery and disease were prevalent. Slaves resisted by jumping overboard, refusing to eat, and revolting. One in six slaves died during this voyage.

Arrival in the New World

The sale of human cargo occurred in several ways.
A single buyer may have purchased the whole cargo. Individual slaves could be auctioned to the highest bidder. The scramble had the slaves driven into a corral and the price was fixed.
Buyers rushed among the slaves, grabbing the ones they wanted.

In the sale process, Africans were closely examined, probed and poked.

Political and Economic Effects on Africa

The slave trade:
resulted in the loss of millions of people over hundreds of years weakened African states who became dependent on European trade caused long-term stagnation of the West African economy prepared the way for European conquest of Africa in the nineteenth century

Part Five

The Development of North American Slave Societies

Slavery in North America

Map: Slave Colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries Slavery spread throughout the Caribbean and southern coast of North America. By 1770, Africans and African Americans numbered 460,000 in British North America-- comprising over 20% of the colonial population.

Slavery Comes to North America

Between about 1675 and 1700 the Chesapeake went from being a society with slaves to a slave society.
There was a decline in immigration of English servants. European immigrants had better opportunities in other colonies. The Royal English African Company began shipping directly to the region and the labor shortage was filled with slaves.

Expansion of slavery prompted Virginia to develop a comprehensive slave code. More Africans were imported into North America between 1700 and 1710 than in the entire previous century.

The Tobacco Colonies

Slave societies arose in areas where a commodity was produced that commanded an international market. Tobacco was the most important commodity produced in eighteenth century North America, accounting for 25 % of the value of all colonial exports. Slavery allowed the expansion of tobacco production since it was labor-intensive. Using slave labor, tobacco was grown on large plantations and small farms. The slave population in this region grew largely by natural increase.

The Lower South

South Carolina was a slave society from its founding. The most valuable part of the early economy was the Indian slave trade. Rice and indigo were the two major crops. In South Carolina, large plantations employing many slaves dominated. Georgia prohibited slavery until South Carolina planters began to settle on the coast with their slaves. By 1770, about 80 % of the coastal population of South Carolina and Georgia was African American.

Slavery in the Spanish Colonies

Though the papacy denounced slavery it was a basic part of the Spanish colonial labor system. The character of Spanish slavery varied by region.
In Cuba, on sugar plantations, slavery was brutal. In Florida, slavery resembled household slavery common in Mediterranean and African communities. In New Mexico, Indian slaves were used in mines, as house servants, and as fieldworkers.

Spain declared Florida a haven for runaway slaves from the British colonies and offered land to those who would help defend the colony.

French Louisiana
Natchez Rebellion 1629
The Natchez Indians and the slaves of Louisiana joined together in an armed uprising killing ten percent of the colonial population. Authorities crushed the rebellion but diversified economy and French Louisiana became a society with slaves.

French settlers used slave labor but slaves made up only about one-third of the population. Louisiana did not become an important North American slave society until the end of the eighteenth century.

Slavery in the North

Slavery was a labor system in some northern commercial farming areas but only made up ten percent of the rural population in these regions. In port cities, slavery was common.
By 1750, the slave and free African populations made up 15 to 20 % of the residents of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

Elsewhere in the countryside, slavery was relatively uncommon. Antislavery sentiment first arose among the Quakers of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Part Six

African to African American

The Daily Lives of Slaves

The North American country-born, or Creole, slave population was rapidly growing. Africans formed the majority of the labor force that made the plantations profitable and thus built the South. As agricultural peoples, Africans were used to rural routines and most slaves worked in the fields. Slaves were supplied rude clothes and hand-me-downs from the master's family. On small plantations and farms, Africans may have worked along side their masters. Large plantations provided the population necessary for the development of an African American culture.

Families and Communities

In the development of African American community and culture, the family was the most important institution. Slave codes did not legalize slave marriages and families were often separated by sale or bequest. Slaves created family structures developing marriage customs, naming practices, and a system of kinship. Fictive kinship was used by slaves to humanize the world of slavery.

African American Culture

The formative period of African American community development was the eighteenth century. The resiliency of slaves was shown in the development of a spiritually sustaining African American culture drawing upon dance, music, religion, and oral tradition. Until the Great Awakening, large numbers of African Americans were not converted to Christianity. Death and burial were important religious practices. Music and dance formed the foundations of African American culture. The invention of an African American language facilitated communication between American-born and African slaves.

The Africanization of the South

Acculturation occurred in two directions--English influenced Africans and Africans influenced English. Africanization was evident in:
cooking: barbecue, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, and collard greens material culture: basket weaving, wood carving, and architecture language: yam, banjo, tote, buddy music and dance: banjo

Violence and Resistance

The slave system was based on force and violence. Africans resisted in the following ways:
Refusing to cooperate and malingering Mistreating tools and animals Running away Revolt

There was always fear of uprisings but slaves in North America rarely revolted.
Conditions for a successful revolt were not present. Slaves had also developed culture and communities and did not want to risk losing these things.

Part Seven

Slavery and Empire

Slavery the Mainspring

Map: Triangular Trade across the Atlantic The slave trade was the foundation of the British economy.
Created a large colonial market for exports that stimulated manufacturing Generated huge profits that served as a source of investments Supplied raw cotton to fuel British industrialization

Table: Value of Colonial Exports by region, annual average, 1768-1772

The Politics of Mercantilism

Mercantilism
Colonies existed to benefit the mother country The economy should be controlled by the state The economy was a "zero-sum" game where profits for one country meant losses for another.

Competition between states was to hoard the fixed amount of wealth that existed in the world.

Wars for Empire

The English, French, and Spanish struggled for control over North America and the Caribbean in a series of wars that had their European counterparts. Wars in the southern region of the colonies focused on slavery. Wars in the northern region were generally focused on the control of the Indian trade.

British Colonial Regulation

European nations created state trading monopolies to manage the commerce of its empires. The Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1696 created the legal and institutional structure of Britain's colonial system. The Wool, Hat, and Iron acts reduced colonial competition with British manufacturing interests. Great Britain did not allow colonial tariffs, banking, or local coinage. The increase in colonial trade led Britain to pursue a policy of "salutory neglect."

The Colonial Economy

The colonial economy grew rapidly. The New England shipbuilding was stimulated by trade. Benefits for northern port cities
Participation in the slave trade to the South and West Indies Trading foodstuffs for sugar in foreign colonies

Between the 1730s and 1770s, the commercial economies of the North and South were becoming integrated.

Part Eight

Slavery and Freedom

The Social Structure of the Slave Colonies

Slavery produced a highly stratified class society.
Elite planters held more than half of the land and sixty percent of the wealth. Small planters and farmers made up half of the adult white male population.
Many kept one to four slaves.

Throughout the plantation region, landless men constituted about forty percent of the population.
Work included renting land, tenant farming, hiring out as overseers, or becoming indentured servants.

White Skin Privilege

Skin color determined status. Legal and other racial distinctions were constant reminders of the freedom of white colonists and the debasement of all African Americans, free or slave. Relationships between free whites and enslaved blacks produced a mixed-ancestry group known as mulattoes.
Majority of mulattoes were slaves.

Racism created contempt between African Americans and colonists.

Part Nine

Conclusion

Slavery and Empire, 1441-1770

Media: Chronology